Suggestions on how to improve my website please

deadbattery

Junior Member
Hi everybody,

I've been looking for some advice on how to update my current website and this place looks quite friendly, so I hope you don't mind me asking a few questions :D

I'm an illustrator on the third year of my course and I desperately need to change how my website is coded. It's a requirement of the course to build a website, but they only have time to teach us over four sessions, so the teacher strongly suggests building the layout in Photoshop then slicing it up into Dreamweaver for direct upload. It worked out fine and I have a website that I'm happy with, but I've recently realised that it seems like quite a lame method and is very hard to update.

I don't have much website building experience so I didn't think about it at the time, but I can't seem to make much sense of adding new images to it. I figure I need to go back to the Photoshop file and add in the images and slice them, then rename everything to fit the existing structure and basically shunt everything along. I'm not sure if that's correct but I can't see any other way around it! The other issue I have is that my illustration descriptions are all images too, which means I can't edit them in Dreamweaver. You can see my site here.

I would like to have the same layout but so that everything's editable in Dreamweaver, so I can swap out images easily etc. What would be the best way to do this? I've been trying to build a layout using div tags but I don't think I'm going about it the right way.

Can any one suggest what my next step should be please? I'm quite persistent and can pick things up quickly, but it would be great to know if I'm going in the right direction first! :p

Thank you!
Cathy
 
Hi Cathy, well firstly the site looks great. You're not a website designer so your not expected to have a website with all the bells and whistles, the point of your site is to showcase your work and it does that in a simple yet effective way.

If you want a portfolio which is easily manageable try something like Simple Viewer , I use it on my site and it's pretty easy to manage. If you do decide to use it feel free to PM me and I'll give you some help setting it up.
 
Hi Cathy...

You could also consider the solution of using a building software that does all the work for you as long as your purpose is not to become a web designer...For example, many friends of mine use AllWebMenus to have a professional looking navigation menu and other software like this to add tooltips or Accordions,,,You could try this...
 
Very nice looking site though,

First thing you should do is to get rid of the text images,
You should write a real text because it's good for the SEO,
and more people can look for your website.

Basically the design looks good, looks professional.
additional tips i can say about the seo,

I see your website code starts like that:

Code:
<html><head><title>Cathy Hookey Illustration</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

It's recommended that you'll add meta description and keyword, and also grab the HTML tag from the w3 library, for example:

Code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><title> Cathy Hookey Illustration </title><meta name="description" content="Type here a short description of you site" /><meta name="keywords" content="Type here keyword that people can find you like that: Cathy Hookey Illustration, Cathy Hookey, Illustration, And more" />

Hope that helps :)
 
AllWebMenus is proprietary though (and not necessary unless you want drop-downs). I'd suggest porting over to Wordpress. There are so many great gallery plugins out there.
 
I would suggest you that give a well and magnified shape to your contact no.and email id because they are the main point of contact for you.Although it looks good in design i,e simple and sober.
 
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